


Not Crazy

by WaterandWin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-01
Updated: 2011-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-22 02:16:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaterandWin/pseuds/WaterandWin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patient Transfer<br/>John Doe 612<br/>Age: unknown, ~12-15</p><p>Your name is Karkat Vantas. Your skin is grey and you have horns and no one believes you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Homesmut:
> 
>  _...I-I have this thing for asylum AUs, okay?_
> 
>  _I've seen the cliche thing for these things, Character A is interning Asylum B and is somehow taking care of horrible Mental Patient C despite the warnings from the veteran co-workers, etc, etc. It gets kinda boring after a while, y'know?_
> 
>  _Besides that, I'm not looking for much, so write away! Be creative on this, I'm kinda curious what kind of mental ailment you put the characters in._
> 
>  _Right now I'm into Jade/Karkat and John/Vriska, but you can put in other pairings, blackrom included. You can also have romance between employees. heehee._
> 
>  _Bonus point if Dave's there for irony's sake. (Or has an ironic job relating to all this)_

If Sgrub came with a manual, it would come with a trillion warnings, but in your opinion the most important one, the one put first and in bold in all caps, would be DO NOT JUMP INTO THE SCRATCH. Even when you’re the last one left alive and Jack is coming, it would be easier to face death than end up on an earth where no one understood but tried to help anyway. 

Your name is Karkat Vantas. Your skin is grey and you have horns and no one believes you. They shine bright lights in your eye and make you identify a million useless colors and frown when you tell them brown is brown and not grey. They tie you down stick your head in a machine of lights and noise and take pictures of your head from the inside. When you try to bite them, your fangs can’t seem to break their stupid white gloves. 

You’re a troll, you tell them. You’re a troll and  _they’re_  the stupid fuckers that need  _their_  eyes checked and think pans scanned. They just exchange glances and start to fill out the paper work.

Patient Transfer  
John Doe 612  
Age: unknown, ~12-15

By the time you’re screaming at them that you’re six, you’re six not twelve, not fifteen, six, they’re jabbing something sharp in your arm and you don’t remember much after that. 

They keep calling you John even though you insist you have a name. They insist right back that there is literally no one on file born with with the name Karkat Vantas. You reply you weren’t born, you were hatched, okay not hatched, you cloned yourself and your friends in a laboratory and it’s all kind of a long story and they just all nod their heads and continue writing John Doe 612.

After you lash out at them a few times they start to give you pills that they practically force down your throat with every disgusting meal until you’re not angry anymore, you’re not anything, you’re barely Karkat, you barely  _are_. 

When they run out of tests to give you, they stuff you in a white room with a useless human bed. You tell them you need sopor slime for the nightmares and they just give you more pills and sure enough, you don’t dream. It’s still not the same. The bed is squeaky and lumpy and smells like chemicals, but the floor is too cold so you have to make do. The bed is pretty much the only thing in your room and it’s fucking bolted to the floor for some reason. There are no windows, just a big old ugly light overhead that buzzes when it’s turned on. It’s too high for you to reach and so is the vent.

A man comes in to talk to you every day. He’s old and balding and his teeth are yellow and he pretends like he’s nice but you can tell he doesn’t believe a word you say when you finally tell him about Sgrub. For some reason he latches on the fact that all your friends are dead, which is sad, yeah, but your biggest problem now is the fact that everything thinks you’re human. But no, this fucker hands you a book on grief and you overhear him say something about post-traumatic stress to one of the nurses. The book is stupid and useless and you chuck it against the wall. 

Eventually they stop bringing food to your room and haul you off to get it yourself from this enormous room full of other people wearing the same ugly grey clothes as you, all scarfing down the slop you have to wait in line to get. You sit as far away from anyone else as you can and bare your teeth if anyone gets close. 

They do this to you three times a day, and after the second time, which they call lunch, they force you into a room with a bunch of retards to talk about your problems together like that’s a thing that’s going to happen. It’s not, because you’re Karkat Vantas and you’re certainly not crazy. They stop dragging you to these meetings after one guy thought Gamzee was funny and you lunged at his throat. 

It’s hard to tell when they rarely take you outside, but you figure at least a sweep has gone by. Perhaps two. You start to count the nights to keep track but it’s hard because the pills make your head fuzzy. In the end, you just decide to start telling the men in white that you’re seven and they flip their shit like this is an improvement. Maybe they just aren’t used to time passing, since that doesn’t seem to be a thing in this place.You’re pretty much resolved to dying here when one day, you just see her. At least you think you do. You choke on your chilly or whatever the fuck this shit is. It goes down the wrong pipe and what’s worse it that between all the coughing you realize her name is on the tip of your tongue but not coming. You panic and it gets harder to breathe suddenly but all you can think about is oh god oh god  _what is her name_  as your tray of food clatters to the floor. 

Suddenly you feel a hand on your shoulder and you turn to fight it off when you actually come face to face with her. She’s looking at you all concerned with big green eyes and her lips are moving around her enormous teeth that look more normal now that she’s older but you can’t focus on the words coming out. Your eyes zero in on her name tag and the yes, that’s her name! It hits you like a punch to the chest.

“...Jade.”

She laughs. Her laugh hasn’t changed and you almost do something you haven’t done in...ages. You almost smile, but not quite. 

“Are you okay?” 

You realize that’s probably what she’s been trying to ask you all along. You want to nod but your neck feels too stiff, so you just repeat her name. 

Her smile fades a bit and she looks up to the older man she was following before. He just shrugs.

“He’s been here for years. Don’t mind him.”

Jade looks back at you and the question flies out before you can get a grip on it and tell it it’s stupid.

“Do you remember me?”

She blinks and looks back up at the man. His eyes are narrowed at you like he can see inside your head, but you know he can’t because he can’t even see the outside of it, the way it’s supposed to be with horns and all. 

“Not really,” he says at last, even though how would he know? “But she could. Would you like to talk to her later.”

Jade flies to her feet before you have time to answer. “I don’t know about this, sir,” she stammers. “I’m an anthropology major. I have no experience with psychology!”

He ignores her. “How about it?”

You look between him and Jade a few times. It’s not that hard a choice. You’re positive that you can make Jade remember. She’s post-scratch Jade, but she’s still Jade. She has to be. 

You nod.


	2. Chapter 2

You don’t hear anything from them for the rest of the day. That night you have an even harder time sleeping than usual and by the end of breakfast the next morning you’ve eaten more of your own fingernails than this vomit they call oatmeal. You want to be as lucid as possible when you talk to Jade, so you hide the pills they give you under your tongue instead of swallowing them, then spit them in your hand when no one’s looking. One weirdo asks if he can have them instead and you fork the soggy things over and watch him gobble them up and giggle. Fuck that guy.

You bite your tongue and say nothing to Mr. Baldy yellow teeth man, even though you think you might explode from wanting to talk about Jade. When he presses you about it, you tell him that you just know her, okay, from her past life, and he seems to accept the answer while nodding thoughtfully. You know he thinks you’re nuts and for once you don’t give a shit because for once in your stinking miserable existence there is someone who just might believe you’re not crazy.

Time goes impossibly slow. Lunch seems like it happens a week later and you pick at your green beans and eat nothing. Finally,  _finally_ , mercifully, instead of taking you to Art to paint shitty paintings expressing your feelings, they take you back to some white room and she’s there, sitting at a table for two, looking very uncomfortable and awkward but sweet mother grub it’s her. It’s really her. You can’t take your eyes off her and she keeps switching from looking at you to looking down and looking over at the wall to her left. 

The nurse sits you down on the chair and handcuffs you by a long chain to the bolted down table. Whatever. You let her. You don’t care. She leaves and Jade looks over at the wall again before clearing her throat.

“...Hi,” she begins nervously. “I, uh, I guess you know my name already.” She pauses when you say nothing. “It’s Jade. And you, uh, go by...” she looks down at the papers in front of her and flips to the second or third, “...Karkat, right? That’s a very interesting name.”

When you hear her say it, it’s like you’re able to breathe again after having to hold your breath for sweeps. It slides off her tongue and there’s a little flutter of hope in you. She’ll remember. She will. It’s Jade. She’s here.

She asks you a question and you miss it. “Huh?”

“Your name,” she repeats. “Does it mean anything?”

You shrug. “I made it up myself.”

“Oh,” she responds, glancing over at the wall again. You look over that way too, but it’s just a wall. When you glance back at her, she’s fiddling with her fingers.

“Your colorful reminders are gone,” you note. 

She stares. Her mouth starts to form words, stops before anything can come out, and tries again. Nothing’s coming.

“Right, I guess I should explain,” you bud in. Under the table, your hands are wringing nervously as well. Explaining is easier said than done. You’re not sure if you can stand her giving you that look that every other human you’ve explained your story to has, but if you don’t, she might just slip through your fingers and disappear. “When you were thirteen you played a game with your friends. Eventually, you got to a point in the game where you couldn’t win, so you... you reset. The reset world, the second try world, is this one, but I was there during the first.” She’s still not saying anything so you continue. “I talked to you. I talked to most of your friends, actually. I don’t think I ever spoke to Rose--” her eyes widen, “--and I barely talked to Dave--” her hands clench, “--but I tried to troll John a lot, so--”

“Stop,” she practically shrieks. Her voice rings around the tiny room and settles like a thousand needles in your head. “Just... stop,” she breathes when your ears stop ringing. “I don’t know how you know about my childhood friends, but don’t you ever mention that last one again!”

“Joh--”

“No!” She’s on her feet in a second. Her hands are shaking, all of her is. “I don’t--I don’t want to think about what happened--”

“What happened?”

“--ever again, so don’t--”

“What happened to John!?”

“--bring him up again--”

“What  _happened_?”

“Shut up!!” For a second she looks like she wants to smack you, but instead she gathers up her papers in angry heap and turns for the door.

“No! Jade!” You try to rip out of your chair but your wrist is held fast. “Jade, come back!” you yell over the sound of a slamming door, but even that doesn’t stop you from struggling for your life, biting, scratching, yelling because your very sanity depends on it, until a needle buries sedatives under your skin. 

When you wake up, it takes a few hours of lying with your face to the wall for the drugs to wear off and the anger to replace them. You fucked up. How do you manage to surprise yourself every time like this? You don’t think you could do anything worse, and then you do. Your one hope, your one chance, and you blew it. You couldn’t just scroll over and troll her in the past. She was just... gone. She didn’t believe you. She didn’t remember. Somehow, even though you know she exists now, you feel more alone at this moment than you’ve felt since coming to this planet. It’s your fault. All your fault.

By the time they prick you again, you’ve left a bloody smear on the wall with your knuckles. You’re back to being locked in your room all day, as if you really give a shit, as if being locked in a bigger room with a million idiots could be worse than being locked in a room with yourself. The pills turn your boiling anger into a dull ache at the back of your skull, but even then her memory still dances on the edge of your mind, as illusive as a ghost.

You start to sleep a lot and with the medicine everything starts to feel like it’s a dream. You don’t lash out. You don’t feel. Hell, you barely respond when they bring you back to the little white room and chain you to the desk again. You don’t blink when she joins you on the other side because by now you’re used to her presence in your head. She’s not real. She’s not coming back. You can’t remember why she’s not coming back, but you’re not exactly motivated to think hard enough to find out.

“Hello again,” she forces a smile. 

You give her a nod. The smile fades.

“I feel pretty awful about what happened last time,” she admits with a sigh. “I’ve been having weird dreams lately, and you were in one of them, but you had, uhh,” hesitantly she lifts her hands and holds up a finger on each beside her head. “...horns.” 

You blink. Twice. What she’s saying is important...you think. Why again?

“Well anyway,” she tries to laugh nervously but it sounds all wrong. “I came to apologize, and I guess if you still wanted to know about... you know... it just feels like I should tell you, if you still want.”

Do you know? You’re not sure you do. What is it you wanted to know again? 

“Karkat?” 

You look up at her big, worried, green eyes. 

“Do you want to know what happened to John? ...John Egbert?”

A gear in your head clicks into place. You don’t entirely recognize your own recognition, but you know you want to. You have to know. Something behind all that white noise in your head is pushing for the surface and you don’t know if you want it to come back up or not. You nod because that's what you do when people talk to you nowadays. You just nod. 

There’s a long silence in which she looks at the wall and at her hands and at you. Then she sighs again and when she talks she nearly winces like it hurts to force the words out. 

“When I was thirteen, he... he vanished. No one knows what happened, he just went to sleep on his birthday and when his dad came into the room the next day his window was flung open and there was an odd breeze and... my brother was... just... gone.” 

She’s wringing her hands worse than ever when a drop lands on her finger. You follow where it came from and see a similar one on her cheek. Her shoulders are all tense and shaking and her eyes are squeezed shut tight. 

“There was no sign of a struggle,” she continued. “No note, nothing. We looked for him for days, for years, but it was like he just... vanished into thin air.” She swallows and another droplet falls on her fingers. You don’t know why but you reach over and put your hand over where it fell. When you look up she’s looking at you. 

“He became a god,” you tell her in all seriousness like it means anything to either of you, which on your end it doesn’t, at least you don’t think it does. 

She bites her lip and nods. This time the little turn in her lip is genuine; it reaches all the way up to her eyes. “Thank you.” 

She holds your gaze a second longer before dislodging one of her hands and rubbing her eyes. You take your own hand back and watch. 

“Your colorful reminders are gone,” you note. It feels like this has happened before. “Except that one.”

“Oh,” she lowers her hand to examine the small silver band before twisting it around her finger like she’d been doing since the beginning. “Yeah, I guess you could call this a reminder.” Her smile stretches wider. “It reminds me that Dave Strider loves me very much, and that he’s going to marry me."


	3. Chapter 3

Your stomach does a flip-flop and you don’t know why. The name sounds familiar and you think it means something to you, but you can’t remember what. That dull ache in your head becomes louder. You get the impulse to hit something, but it’s most like a suggestion than a drive and you don’t obey it, because in the end it’s just a name. The implication of the final sentence is lost in translation entirely. Later you would ask the bald man what it meant and he would explain in a convoluted, romanticized way what you took to mean that marriage meant to mate for life. Troll society has no analogue for that, at least not in the human sense. There was troll serendipity, a fated match, and in a sedative-laden haze you would giggle over a sweeps-old shipping chart finally coming true only to discover several hours later a hole in a place in your heart you didn’t know existed.

But that would be then, and this was now. Now you just nodded sleepily as always and considered what a strange dream this was turning out to be. The two of you sit there in silence, both minds elsewhere. When Jade jolts back to reality a minute and a half later, she asks if there’s anything you want to talk about. 

Nothing comes to mind. You shake your head. She bites her lip.

“Do you want me to come back?” she asks after some consideration. 

There it is: the second chance you never thought you’d get and you’d never imagine you’d deserve. And yet what you deserve doesn’t matter, because the answer is the same regardless. Yes. Always yes. 

When you leave that day, your head feels a little bit clearer. During dinner, you hide your your medicine and give half to Chuckles like before to ensure your think pan stays that way. It does, and for the first time since you were brought here you have a nightmare. It’s tame by your usual standards, but after lying in your bed for several minutes you realize it makes you ecstatic. For a brief dream, you feel like your old self again. You’d never thought you’d miss that idiot so much.

You don’t stop taking the drugs cold turkey because the nurses would notice a change in behavior. You ease off gradually by the day. In the meantime, Jade visits regularly.

Her laugh is just the same as you remember it; the same dorky, sporadic hiccups endured the reset of a universe. She laughs at nearly everything, and normally you would be gritting your teeth but you’re too wrapped up in just hearing it again to hate it. Her hair is tamer this time around, but you’re hard pressed to decide if that’s a consequence of being raised by an adult human or just growing up and learning to take better care of herself. Her face looks just the same and yet oddly out of place on a body you can’t claim to recognize but can’t honestly say you don’t like either. 

Your sessions together start the same. She always asks you questions about how you’ve been and you always answer the same thing. At first this was followed by silence that she broke by confessing she had another dream. Nowadays, you just go ahead and ask. Her dreams are always something different. They aren’t Prospit dreams by any means, or maybe they are, you don’t know and neither does she. Sometimes they’re just landscapes, other times it’s a snippet of a memory. She describes to you what you see and you try to explain it. You can’t tell if she believes you entirely, or even understands how an alchemizer can create something from nothing or how the gates work or where the Incipisphere actually is, or what dream bubbles are, but you tell her all these things anyway in all the detail you can muster from memories that you’ve replayed in your head for so long they hardly seem real. Maybe your stories fuel her dreams that in turn fuel more stories, but if so, all the better for it. As long as she remembers.

You can tell her favorite parts are when you tell her about her and her friends. You save John for last, and when you do finally bring him up she’s hesitant to drag the story in that direction. She warms up to it gradually though, until she’s asking you questions like she expects you to communicate with the dead or something.

And yet, although she’s amazed by how much you know of people that in this universe you’ve never met, she never quite seems to believe you. It’s a just a story to her, a story made up in the mind of an asylum patient. When you tell her about Alternia she humors you like a child and you grip the table until your knuckles turn to ash and try and force her to understand so that maybe, maybe, she’ll remember. 

She doesn’t.

“This is the last time I’m going to visit,” she tells you as she’s gathering her things to leave one day. “My internship ends today, so I won’t be coming back.” 

You stammer a jumble of questions and retorts that when separated make maybe three and a half thoughts, but when strung together make very little sense at all. She looks at you with eyes filled with too much pity and not enough understanding as she comes around the table and wraps her arms around your neck. Her smell, an oddly nostalgic mix of grass and citrus, envelopes you both.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“No, you’re coming back,” you insist into her shoulder in a voice much higher than you’re used to hearing come out of your mouth. 

She pulls back and holds you by the shoulders. Her face is painted with that sad smile again. “It’s been really fun, Karkat. I enjoyed your stories.” 

Stories. Just stories. 

She pulls away. You latch onto her wrist.

“No. Stay.”

She tries to pull away but you refuse to relinquish your grasp.

“Karkat.”

“Please.”

“....Karkat, let go.” 

You’re making this hard for her, you can tell and you don’t care. Let it be hard for her, maybe then she’ll stay. Maybe then she’ll remember. Except she does neither of those things because she’s Jade and her emotions are fleeting and when there are too many of them buzzing in her head she’s quick to anger. Like she was back then. Like she is now.

“Let go of me,” she snaps with a stamp of her foot. Her voices seems to stab you and leave a gaping physical wound that weakens your grasp. 

“I’m sorry but it has to be this way,” she tells you sternly as she cradles her hand in a way that makes you think that you might have held on a little too hard. “Goodbye, Karkat.”

“...Don’t leave,” you choke.

She doesn’t listen. For a second you hold your breath as she pauses in the doorway like she might say something else, and then with a click you’re alone in a white room on an alien planet without a beacon in the darkness to remind you of home.

The next day, they take you to Art. And the day after that. And the day after that. You actually put effort in this time. Instead of just coloring the canvas grey, you do your best to render Jade’s old island hive as well as you can remember it. When she comes back, she’ll see and remember. She’s coming back because you forgot to say goodbye.

Next you draw the Land of Frost and Frogs, one version with snow and one without. You aren’t very good at this but you paint it over and over again until it resembles what you want it to, because the better it is the sooner she’ll remember. You draw the other planets as well, because as the Witch of Space she would have seen what they looked like. She’s coming back, you tell yourself, she’s coming back and when she sees what you’ve made for her she’ll remember.

A week goes by and she doesn’t return. A week turns into a month, and a months turns into several. You think you might be eight or nine by now. You watch your horns grow in the mirror and wonder if, when she remembers, she’ll be able to see them, too. 

You also sometimes wonder if you really are crazy. 

In the end, you decide you probably are.

And then the meteors come. You can’t see them because because you don’t have a window, but you’d know that sound anywhere. They start small and few and bounce off the roof with a clang that sends chills down your spine. Within the hour they get bigger and there are more of them. Somewhere on earth, a bunch of kids are scrambling to prototype kernelsprites and link of servers, and somewhere in the the Medium those same kids are fighting the King, but you hardly care. You’re Karkat Vantas and you have no place in Sburb session. All you can do is lie on your back on your lumpy bed and listen to the Veil thunder against the roof. 

There’s a knock on the door. You have a phone call. They don’t give you a choice whether you take it or not, they just lead there. 

She’s on the other line, sobbing. You can’t understand what she’s saying because the noise is too much and there are dozens of other patients talking on phones all around you in little cubbies. 

“I don’t understand,” you shout over them. She wails something. “I can’t hear you!! Jade!” 

“I--” something gargled, followed by your name.

“What??”

More gargling noises. The line is breaking up.

“Jade!! Jade, can you hear me?”

Through some miracle, the line goes crystal clear long enough for you to hear the words that freeze your breath. 

“Karkat, I remember!!!!”

Before you can respond, before you can even fully grasp your wildest dreams in the palm of your hand, the loudest sound you have ever heard in your life fills the room and everything goes flying in a whirl of pain and fire. The receiver is wrenched from your hands as you’re thrown against the wall. Agony splits your head with an audible wet whack and then there’s nothing but a few seconds of dial tone.

When you wake up, you’re floating, glowing green, with all the secrets of the universe stuffed inside your head in neat packages in the form of infuriatingly vague riddles, and Jade is grinning at you with tears running down her face.


End file.
